and the Greek islands, and Greeks send bishops to Sicily, Calabria, and Apulia. It does not seem to have made any difference whether a man was a Greek from Syracuse or a Greek from Athens or Constantinople. Moreover, the reasons which caused the use of Latin in church at Rome did not obtain in the South. There was no need to adopt another language than Greek for use in church here, because Greek was still the vulgar tongue.
Yet there are difficulties about the ecclesiology of Southern Italy and Sicily during the first seven centuries. For one thing, it is curious, and to the liturgical student disastrous, that writers of the early Christian centuries disregard these questions of rite, liturgical language, and custom. They, naturally, think matters of faith and unity of great importance. They give us plenty of information about these; so that we have no difficulty in finding out which bishops were Arians, Pelagians, and so on. We can also tell easily if any bishop was in schism with the rest of Christendom. These matters are noted in an abundance of letters and contemporary documents. But, supposing a bishop was a good Catholic, no one seems to think it worth while to note what rite he used, how he said his prayers. This is disappointing to the modern student of liturgy. If early bishops had written down exact accounts of their services, it would have been a great benefit to us. But it is, in itself, natural. To them these were matters of very little importance. Liturgiology as a science was not yet born. They knew that it matters very much whether a man is a Catholic or not, very little in what language he says his prayers.
The difficulty, then, is this: we know that in Sicily and Southern Italy at the beginning Greek was the ecclesiastical language. We know, too, that when the Normans came in the eleventh century they found a flourishing Greek Church in possession here. It would then seem natural to suppose that there had never been anything else, that the first Latin influence was that of the Normans. Yet we have evidence that it was not so. On the contrary, there had been, centuries before the Norman conquest, much Latin influence in the Church of Lower Italy, and there had been a deliberate introduction of Greek customs and language imposed on the people, in spite of opposition, in the eighth century. When the Normans began spreading Latin uses among the clergy, they were not so much introducing a new element as rather restoring what the Emperors at Constantinople had destroyed.
